Red faced and shins grazed, and the end of a chance.

Let’s get down in writing thoughts on the apology, to all those whom he has wronged during the incumbent coalition, issued by Nick Clegg. The apology itself has been a long time coming, albeit perhaps for a little too long for it to even mean anything. The concept of an elected mandate being entirely disregarded once in power has always been rather unthinkable in democratic politics.

What is more unthinkable is the idea that it can be made better with a pathetically groveling apology. Who knows whether Clegg did believe he could make it better by saying sorry, but that is beside the point. He should have known he couldn't. He should have left it be.

Many young peoples' lives have been adversely affected by the policies of this government, and the fury of the young could not have gone unnoticed as the treasury was assaulted, fires started, people killed. Apparently it did though. Or, more likely, they didn't care. We know they didn't care when the rhetoric turned to the swallowing of bitter medicine. We also knew they'd care eventually when the financial pillaging of our country did nothing but leave a generation disaffected and a party scorned.

The apology appears as little more than an insult. The promise could have been kept; the upper echelons of the Liberal Party are not kept in the dark about the financial situation of Parliament. If it couldn't have been kept, then they should have said so.

The Liberals, particularly Clegg, must have had the acumen to predict a huge swing of power in their favor after the 2010 election, and so the increasingly common practice of the Liberal Party proposing policies of protest and reaction should have been dropped. They weren't. Clegg can try and paint it as making over optimistic promises, but in fact the optimism was much closer to lying.

The current coalition is a strange composition, highly unlikely to ever repeat itself, inevitably to be dissolved after the next election. With this in mind, Clegg should have been more wary of driving the final knife into the party he heads by bringing up now simmering resentments back to the boil. He should have been more wary of burning his own career into the ground.

Most importantly, he should have been more wary of admitting to an unforgivable crime; the total disregarding of a mandate elected by the people. Coalition does not mean a clean slate; their privileged position was given to them by votes, mostly from the young.

An apology won’t do. We want blood from the party that ruined a generation. We want justice.